


lamentation

by talionprinciple (Triskai)



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 02:50:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14728556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triskai/pseuds/talionprinciple
Summary: You will lay low, down inside the earth, where you’ll keep the past like an oyster keeps its pearl.





	lamentation

Laurence says: “Brador.”

You hear his voice waver and are afraid. Something cold and solid settles in your ribcage, hollows you out; you don’t know it then, but you’ll carry that fear with you for the rest of your life.

You turn to him and he reaches a hand out to your face. There’s an unfocused look to him. Like he can’t quite see you.

“Is there something wrong with my eyes?”

* * *

They take you out to the side of the chapel for your self-imposed sentence and give you two things. The bell is familiar. The eye… the eye is fresh. You hold it in your curved palm and the squishy bloody thing is still warm. You don’t look at it. You’re afraid you’ll see something like recognition.

The two Church hunters with you are silent, faces tilted skyward. Searching for their elusive cosmos, you think. Well, Laurence could not find it, and they will not find it without him. The light has gone out in the tower of the Church (you are thinking of the lighthouse at the hamlet, how it lit up the great rubbery body of a god out in the waves) and now the ships Laurence sent out searching for the stars will never come home. 

None of this concerns you. Let the blind lead the blind into the surf. You will lay low, down inside the earth, where you’ll keep the past like an oyster keeps its pearl. Layers and layers and layers until it doesn’t hurt anymore. 

When the hand comes down to take you into a nightmare you call it a mercy.

* * *

“I’m running out of time,” Laurence confesses to you one evening.

You’re on a balcony in the Upper Cathedral Ward. From here you can see the entirety of the shambling creature that is Yharnam. Lately, watching the city has afflicted you with bursts of melancholy; much later, when you have nothing else to do but think, you realize it is because you are envious of their ignorance. The knowledge of the poison that’s slowly running its course through Laurence’s body is a noose around your neck, and the floor beneath your feet is starting to give way.

“Caryll,” you begin, but Laurence stops you with a laugh.

“Caryll’s rune won’t work.” He gestures, meaninglessly. (You watch his long fingers bend in the light, and imagine them with claws.) “It’s only a matter of weeks now, I think. We need to prepare.”

The sun’s setting on Laurence, framing his gaunt face, lighting his head on fire. You can’t look at his face so you look at his feet. There’s mud on his shoes. The dirt in this city crawls onto everything.

* * *

In your dreams it is Laurence on the shore. His body is flowering, his body is aflame. You feed him wood and metal and meat to keep him from burning up. You feed him yourself. The entire city converges on him like flies to a corpse and he gives them everything he is until all that’s left is a skull, cracked and crumbling. This is holy, people say, this is divine. You don’t care.

Why couldn’t they have shown him mercy? Why couldn’t he have shown mercy to himself?

* * *

“I have faith that the blood can be refined,” Laurence whispers into your neck. His bare limbs are tangled with yours in the sheets (his frail body is fever-warm, which you find endearing, like he has trapped the sun within himself to power that ceaseless intellect). “Our experiments show promise. There will come a day when the scourge of the beast is purged from the blood…”

“I believe you,” you say, because you do. How could you not?

Laurence smiles, stroking your cheek. You look down at him with half-lidded eyes. The moon is full and mercilessly bright, casting half his face in harsh shadow. You think you see his eye gleaming in the dark half (this does not strike you as odd, yet). 

“Swear that you will be at my side, when the time comes.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”


End file.
